An airline passenger has virtually watched his lost AirTag fly between 37 cities in the US and Canada for months after it fell out of his bag during a flight onboard an Alaska Airlines Embraer regional twinjet.
The passenger, Éric Béteille, believes that his ‘missing’ AirTag is stuck somewhere in the cargo hold of an Alaska Airlines Embraer E175LR. Since July 2023, when the AirTag dropped out of his hold luggage, he has been tracking the device’s movements as it continues to travel around various airports in the Western US and Canada.
A map posted by Mr. Béteille on social media illustrates the range of the AirTag’s movements over the past nine months and also gives some insight as to how Alaska Airlines uses its regional jet fleet. The AirTag has so far ‘visited’ cities as far south as Austin, Texas, and as far west as Vancouver in Canada. Other cities to which the tracking device has been to include Missoula in Montana, Jackson Hole in Wyoming, and Tucson, Arizona.
Béteille, whose LinkedIn profile states he is a principal content designer at Meta (the parent company of Facebook), has so far racked up over 20,000 likes across his two Facebook posts about the lost AirTag.
The aircraft that is carrying the wayward AirTag is an Embraer ERJ-175LR and is registered as N171SY. The aircraft is operated under contract to Alaska Airlines by US regional carrier SkyWest Airlines and is 8.83 years old. In addition to the astray AirTag, the aircraft carries up to 76 passengers in a three-class configuration – 12 in business class, 12 in economy plus, and 52 in economy.
According to Mr. Béteille, the AirTag flies onboard N171SY around five times per day. In the past 24-hour period (at the time of writing), the missing device will have dropped into such places as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Santa Rosa (all in California), and Redmond in Oregon.
